There is an unusual cabin deep in the woods. It had served as a laboratory and a dwelling for three generations of Lodgers. But as of late the latest Lodger has been noticing weird changes in familiar surroundings; things are missing, noises and rattle heard. Something odd is coming out of the woods.

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About This Game

There is an unusual cabin deep in the woods. It had served as a laboratory and a dwelling for three generations of Lodgers.

But as of late the latest Lodger has been noticing weird changes in familiar surroundings; things are missing, noises and rattle heard. Something odd is coming out of the woods. Come night, it seems like someone's made himself at home in the twilight of rooms, attics, and cellars.

You need to stay awake and sane till dawn.

The Lodger is wandering the rooms, evading the unknown, counting minutes till morning. But it's only in the night that he can solve the main puzzle and find the answers. What's going on? Are the Guests real, or are they just figments of his insomniac imagination? What'd happened to the forest? What's happening to the cabin? Is there a line between reality and imagination?

Gameplay details

Hide! Play hide-and-seek with denizens of your nightmares.

Don't look now! The goal of each night is to reach dawn while still sane.

Fill in the gaps. The house aids the Lodger. You only have to fix it up and keep it in order.

Seek. The Lodger has lost something very important. The reason for what is happening is somewhere inside. Everything that is happening can be explained, you only need to find the key and bring it to light.

Wait. In this game you need to watch and listen carefully. Inspect and scrutinize. You only have to last until the sunrise.

Follow the rules of the game! Of course you must first understand the game being played with you.

This entire game takes place in one night(watch the clock when you have the lantern) in spasms of sleep walking and brief bad dreams. I loved it, but it made me angry, and I am sure it'll make you angry, too.

My girlfriend and I played this together, off and on for three days, trying to get the "good ending." Two things: One, it deliberately obfuscates its own systems. As in, learning the rules and dying in the process is part of the game. Two, it is about general tension and anxiety-- the atmosphere of absolute ick, not shock scares but pervasive questions about what you accept as real. It is a strangely gross-feeling game that manages to put you in a completely agitated state. Not terrified, not disgusted, not creeped out. Just agitated. To the extreme. You know, like an insomniac. Which is the point of the game. That skin-crawly, nothing-is-quite-right feeling. A world out of place.

-IF- that kind of tension and weirdness appeals, and you think it might be a cool experience to live through/conquer/think about, this is an excellent game. But I also get the feeling it'll piss a lot of people off. Whether you'd like it or not, worth experiencing.

This is one of the most unnerving games I've ever played. The art is great, the chilling sounds of floors creaking, wind howling, leaves crunching and the supernatural banging on the walls of your cabin are all great on the developers part. This is a really challenging game with a mystery behind it. Scary isn't the word I'd use for describing this game, but something more like unsettling.

The first time I played it, a wind storm was happening outside and everything was shaking. I really got the natural enjoyment of being thrown into the game with all of the noises outside of my house. Even without though, it's still got me tense and heart racing, but I won't ever forget how much effect this game gave a storm.

Like most Ice Pick Lodge games, Knock-Knock is set in a sombre and dying world. A dying forest in this case, mind you. We play as a reclusive scientist who lives in a forest cabin that inexplicably keeps changing shape (semi-randomized levels, woo!). In the small hours before sunrise a bunch of unseen visitors emerge out of the woods / his mind to play a ghastly game of hide-and-seek with him.

Your main challenge will be in trying to unearth the methods by which your uninvited sojourners operate. What does that knocking sound mean? What happens when I leave on or turn off the light? Why is there a huge eldritch eye on the wall now? You will hear voices. Some of them are friendly, others sound unsettling to say the least. Sometimes they appear to give you hints, while at other times they are just trying to freak you out. The exact rules of their twisted little game seem very complex, and I predict this will add a lot of replay value.

At its heart, this game is about the monsters we create by believing they are there. It plays on those lingering childhood fears that we never quite seem to get rid of (or is that just me?). With the years it becomes harder to be truly enchanted by fantastic stories and fairytales, but darkness and isolation can still strip away the rationality of adulthood, providing a gateway to perhaps one of the few genuine ‘make-believes’ that we have left. I liked how Knock-Knock directly seems to adress the player at certain points, outlining creepy make-believe games that you can try for yourself in the small hours.

In the opening screen the game describes itself as an ‘interactive meditation’, which I think is a pretty good way to put it. Yes, the game will startle you and make you feel tense. Yet to me there was also something strangely soothing, even nostalgic (though not exactly relaxing) about traversing those empty rooms and hallways in the early morning. There are sinister forces at work that may or may not have your best interests in mind, but the game also led me to feel a peculier affinity with these ‘guests’ that came out of the woods to play with me. All the while maintaining a strong sense of impending doom.

This studio is known for making harsh, unforgiving games in which small mistakes can have disasterous unforseen consequences. But unlike other IPL games, Knock-Knock doesn’t let you manage your save-files and thus requires you to restart the whole game if you bugger up in the end. Which is what happened to me, preventing me from getting a satisfying ending. Then again, I suppose this abyss of uncertainty is part of the experience. The game lasts only 2-3 hours, and the threat of failure should be an effective way to keep up the challenge for future playthroughs.

Knock-Knock is a quirky little horror-game that puts you in a strangely meditative state of unease. Worth picking up if you are interested. Needless to say, this should be played alone in a dark room.

This game has a good atmosphere, and it's definitely creepy and scary throughout your time playing it, great for Halloween night. I really enjoyed it in the early going, and had some real moments of fear. But it's crippled by a few absolutely awful design choices. There are a number of game mechanics that are completely confusing and almost entirely unexplained, except through cryptic notes you find during your exploration of the house. That's not great, but it's hardly a deal-breaker.

What is a deal-breaker? I made it all the way to the end, only to find out I could not finish the game because I apparently missed something *somewhere* during my playthrough. What it was and where I missed it, who knows? I'm just trapped repeating the last section. And there is no real save feature, so in order to actually complete the thing, I'd have to start from the beginning and do it all over again. Since the gameplay itself is fairly repetitive, and is only bolstered by some of the mysterious story elements, that is not a very enticing prospect. Because of this utterly frustrating and aggravating state of affairs, I say stay away from it.

This game can be very challenging, even early on, if you don't know what you are doing, but it is a very atmospheric game with a story that takes some thought to process. It's worth picking up, especially around October!

I wrote a review of this that was glorious, and it didnt post, darn. So, this game. Get it. Play in the dark. Go into it, with zero expectations/bias. Headphones. Do what the games tells you to do, even the weird stuff. It, is a experence. Get the game guys, and try to imurse yourself. You may question your own sanity. XD

One Sentence Summary: This game requires specific taste and it might not be for you.

Knock-Knock is a cerebral game of hide-and-seek and uses two perspectives at once. Your protagonist and antagonists are both unreliable and only tell half-truths at best.

Do you like poltergiests? Hauntings? Faeries? Strange happenings? And almost no hand-holding? Are you willing to put up with the poor design choice of including areas that seem to stretch forever with nothing happening? Do you want to have to figure out almost everything for yourself?

Do you like really weird games? Are you OK with a game that auto-saves and will let you screw yourself over if you're not careful and rewards exploration and experimentation in the end?

If you said "Yes" to most of these questions, then you might enjoy Knock-Knock, a game of hide-and-seek with yourself. Its lore is of a classic faerie tale mixed with things that go bump (well, knock) in the night. This game isn't for everyone, with slow pacing and repetitive gameplay that's saved by having a randomly generated level design and creatures with unpredictable behaviour.

However if you're impatient, or uninterested in some really old supernatural experiences, you might want to give this a miss. It's more an interesting game than what I would call a 'great game' -- but for me, the interesting elements far outweighed the simple game play.

Not really much of a horror game, but has it's Very sinister side to make it be that kind of stuff. Anyway, think this more as a psychological experience rather than a game. Why, you may ask.

The gameplay of this indie title consist in a sort of "Hide and seek" game: You play as a man, that you will identify as "The Lodger", who wakes at nightime to check who is knocking at the front door of his house, that he calls "The Lodge". Eh.The game alternates some awake phases, where you have to look for a child figure out of your house, and others dream phases, where you have to remain sane and try to ignore (mostly) the anomalies you may encounter in your house, until the dawn will clear any trace of what might have happened (or entered) to your house.

Oh, i didn't warned you that this game, as psychological is it, don't have a really precise storyline, but may have even different stories based on what the player may think while playing: for example, are the ghosts real or just appearances of the Lodger itself, and lot more to explain with the player's conscience, as we don't get a real explanation about what is actually happening during the game.

So from now of this review i will explain my point of view of the story in this game, up to you to read or not. These thoughts may also contain serious spoils of the game, so better read this after you've played the game by yourself.

Well, the story's about a man, who calls himself the "Lodger", whom lives alone in a house surrounded only by trees.He usually states to be a "world-ologist", writing everything he sees in his diary, given to him from his father when he was learning to write, who told him that he would write his entire life in that diary and, with it's last page, his life would end; Listened to these words, the Lodger had by that time the habit to write very little and small, so that he could have more pages for his next experiences, and also a longer life. But what he didn't expected is that he were only trying to slow his "vital clock", as in the game our goal in the survival phase is to have enough time spent to reach in order the next day, and this particular habit gave him some kind of feedbacks in his mind. The Lodger doesn't even remember the rooms in his house, and often states to be scared by what swarms to the outside, because he don't really know what there's really outside. The fragments of reality and the child are connected and may represent the curiosity of the character, while the monsters that wander the Lodger's house, along with the big monster you encounter when ignoring the "curiosity" of your character during the game, may represent the much stronger side of our protagonist, which is the fear of what he still don't know, of what he never tried to find a meaning of, and is somewhat explained in the experiences we can find in his diary, if we look clearly.

As a final review of this, i would say again that this isn't to be considered something like "a game" that you often get to have some fun, but more like "an experience" you can consider either good or bad, deep or superficial, clear or confused.

Holy crap! This game is creepy. The artwork, dialogue, and super-scary sound effects work really well to set a terrifying mood. Perhaps it was because I was playing in the dark, alone, at 11:30 on Halloween night, but about 30 minutes in I just said "♥♥♥♥ this!"Also, I have a cat, and that never helps when you're trying to enjoy something scary, lol. I will definitely play this game again... I may have the lights on when I do though.

This is such a strange title, it's not really a scary game, but the few bits of music and the setting make for a fairly tense evening everytime I decide to play it.

The rules of the game themselve are not very clear, and while you might be the type who will see it as a challenge, not everyone might have the patience to get punished for something they don't know that they have done.

The game can be very cryptic at times and the good ending is quite difficult to discover without reading a walkthrough, but overall i think this game was a good experience.